Notices

May 23, 2016

Birth Control

In light of the circumstances of Baelor’s reign, we feel that the game needs a clear policy in regards to the availability and effectiveness of birth control.

The primary form of birth control available is moon tea, which is a herbal remedy consisting of various plants such as tansy and pennyroyal. Properly speaking—as in, looking at historical examples—such a remedy is an abortifacient rather than a form of birth control. That is, it can cause a fertilized egg to be expelled but it cannot prevent the fertilization in the first place or affect ovulation. It is not strictly clear whether GRRM intends moon tea to function purely as an abortifacient or if he also imagines that in Westeros it can also prevent impregnation in the first place, but for the purpose of the game it is not strictly necessary to know. It does seem as if the most common usage is to drink moon tea after one suspects a risk of pregnancy, rather than to prevent one.

Baelor, of course, does not look kindly upon moon tea. Not only does it potentially allow for inappropriate behaviour but it also kills babies. Given this, selling moon tea or the ingredients needed for moon tea is not acceptable in King’s Landing. Anyone doing so risks fines or even expulsion from the city. Nobles will in some cases have access to maesters (though far from all houses will have maesters present in King’s Landing), but keep in mind that maesters serve a house and answer to the lord of that house. If the lord’s wife is trying to prevent pregnancy without telling her husband, she’s as unlikely to get moon tea from their maester as an unmarried daughter who is having an illicit affair.

The result of this is that if your character needs access to moon tea, you need to clear that access with staff as you cannot simply assume that it can be obtained. You will need to put in a +job, explain what you need the moon tea for and propose a way to obtain it. This holds true for characters in Dorne as well, even though it will be easier to propose an acceptable way of obtaining moon tea there as there are no strictures like those in King’s Landing imposed on Sunspear.

Furthermore, characters using moon tea will agree to use a random roll (exact format being worked on) on a monthly basis to determine whether it has been working or not. While we see that some characters put great trust in moon tea in the books, it is clear that it cannot be 100% effective since there are a good many bastards in the setting and far from all of them wanted.

To help us maintain a record of the history of the game and to help new players get into the game more easily, it is very important that everyone keeps their characters as updated as possible. As it stands now we often find ourselves forced to close—or even kill off—characters when they are abandoned because it is too difficult to piece together their past history.

Keeping your character updated also affects your progress on the game. If you want to switch to another character or request an alt, we will first request that you update your current character, so doing it regularly makes it much easier for everyone. We also take into account how good a player has been about keeping their character(s) updated when considering applications for Restricted or Limited characters. Finally, when tier advancement is sorted out, how well updated a character has been kept will be an important criteria.

The two most important things to do is to add Events (+HELP CDB EVENTS) when something significant happens and to add or update Relations (+HELP CDB RELATIONS) to other characters. It is also important to regularly look over your History. It should function as a summary of both what is in your character’s background and a summary of significant developments since then. Occasionally, you can also take a look at your Persona and Notes and see if anything needs to be adjusted.

For those of you who like to be mentioned in the Tidings or the Chronicle (and who doesn’t!), adding Events is particularly important; if you haven’t added one for a particular scene, you are much less likely to show up in the writeups done about that scene.

Players who create personal, named NPCs for regular or semi-regular usage need to submit these to the CDB so that their name and any other specific details can be approved and so that they are preseved in the event of a player switching characters. See +HELP CDB SUBMIT for how to do this. Note that tier for such characters will default to V unless the player asks for something else and provides a reason for why it should be higher. More than IV is very unlikely to be approved.

As of August 1st, 2013, Blood of Dragons has become what we refer to as “Blood of Dragons 2.0”, although it must be stressed that the name of the game will not be changed to reflect this.

What this entails is that certain characters and certain elements of the game’s history have been changed to be more in line with new and future canon information. This means that some information that was valid during “Blood of Dragons 1.0” has now become outdated legacy information.

In most cases, the game’s website and the game’s CDB have been updated to reflect the new information. However, we have not edited old Logs, except when edits have only entailed replacing a name with another. As such, all logs submitted prior to August 1st of 2013 display a message at the top, warning the reader that not all information in those logs may be valid for game’s current incarnation.

It is also quite possible that legacy information has survived in other places, though hopefully such issues will be corrected over time.

We’ve had a lot of new players lately and a lot of activity, which is great to see. This has, however, highlighted one of the complexities with how Blood of Dragons is setup, with many characters having been in play before: staying true to what has been established about a character. If you take up a CGed character, you do have to play that character the way it was setup. You cannot ignore or rewrite parts of it that you do not like.

Your character’s past should, naturally, stay as it has been established. If something about a character’s past appears to contradict something else or seems odd in some other way, please speak to Staff. Sometimes oddities do slip by us at the approval stage and sometimes subsequent players make unapproved additions to History and Events.

Your character’s present situation should also pick up where it last left off. It is particularly important to keep in mind that a CGed character will already have been established as being present in either King’s Landing or Sunspear. If you want to work out that the character went away for a while and have now returned, you need to speak to Staff first and make sure it doesn’t conflict with anything.

Your character’s personality and relationship also need to stay consistent with what has been established. You are able to edit existing relationships and to add new ones, but this must never be used to rewrite a character’s connections to other characters without IC reasons that develop out of actual roleplay rather than just a player’s desire to change something. Do keep in mind that the game is on a 1:1 ratio. Characters can of course develop, both in terms of personality and relationships, but not overnight and not without the roleplay to motivate it.

If you are at all uncertain about any pre-established details about your character and/or whether a change to something is reasonable, please don’t hesitate to contact Staff.

If we learn of canon details that make clear or strongly suggest anything that differs from this, we will try to incorporate those changes (as with any non-canon material on the game). Some things cannot be changed (such as the seasons since the start of the game at the beginning of 158), but the further back it goes, the more likely that we would tweak things to fit canon if it becomes known.

Since the question has come up from some Guests interested in playing squires, we’d like to note that the official policy regarding when a PC squire can become a knight is that 18 is the minimum age. This is the general minimum age for having been knighted for those who start playing as knights.

Exceptions are made, both when knighthood is a background detail and when it comes to PC squires, for exceptional combat skills (usually Tier III and upwards), the Prodigy asset and exceptional IC actions. In all cases, admin approval is required for being bestowed a knighthood before the age of 18.

Westeros is not a particularly forgiving place when it comes to behaviour that breaks with what is considered socially acceptable and this is particularly true for women. A woman’s reputation is one of her most valuable assets and once it has been damaged it can be incredibly difficult, even impossible, to repair it.

With King Baelor’s return to court coming up quite soon, we want to stress the importance of an intact reputation for female characters. Baelor may be very forgiving, but he takes sins very seriously. Keep in mind that this is the king that will be locking up his sisters—forbidding them all male contact—so that their beauty cannot tempt men.

In fact, we know that during Baelor’s reign, unwed women are rarely seen at court. It would limit roleplay too much if we went that route, but that makes it even more important that unwed women in particular have near-spotless reputations if they wish to remain at court.

So, what does this mean, in practice? For starters, it means observing thematically appropriate behaviour for unwed women. An unwed woman going off anywhere alone—especially with a man—is highly unlikely, she would always be accompanied by a chaperone, generally a septa if she follows the Seven. If she is not chaperoned, someone will notice. Keep in mind that there are unnamed NPCs all over the Keep and they do gossip.

We do not want to limit anyone’s roleplay but we do want roleplay to fall within what is thematically appropriate. We also do not want to end up in a situation where, once Baelor is back in King’s Landing, some characters may end up being rendered unplayable because they’ll be sent home, sent to a Motherhouse or—later on—locked up in the Maidenvault. But if those consequences are brought on by IC circumstances, they will be enforced.

We also want to stress that this does not just apply to unwed women; they are the most vulnerable to having their reputation tarnished, but to succeed at court under Baelor, everyone will need to watch out.

This includes men as well. Even Prince Aegon will be forced to keep his bad behaviour well hidden from Baelor, so debauchery coming from men could very well lead to them being recalled from court by their families since they will be seriously damaging the reputation of their houses in the eyes of Baelor. As with women, we do not want to render any character unplayable, but we will be enforcing IC consequences when necessary to ensure that Baelor’s reign has an accurate impact on court.

We hope that everyone will see this as an opportunity rather than a limitation; a religious fanatic as king is an obstacle that should generate a lot of tension and complexities.

Given the increased activity of late, we have taken a closer look at those PCs who are set as Restricted, Limited or Elite. Those roles do come with more of an expectation of activity and roleplay leadership but when there is less activity that is not always reasonable to expect players to uphold.

Players may of course notice that some very inactive PCs remain in such roles. We have a soft spot for those who were on board even before the beta, but naturally we do not want this to impact the options for other players. Anyone left in a high profile role even though they are inactive are only allowed to stay in that role if it is the kind of character we would never let another PC have anyway. Furthermore, if they also have a tier that is under quota, they are not counted against the quota.

On a similar note, when Staff members play more than one character of quota-restricted tier, only one of the characters are counted as taking up a slot.

-There is currently (at the time that this message is posted; for up-to-date information, see +CDB/QUOTA) 6 slots for tier III characters and 5 slots for tier II characters available. As some of these slots just opened up, there will be a 5 day request period from the date of this announcement. If the slots are not taken within 5 days, they will remain open and available on a first come, first serve basis. Please see the quota helpfile for further information about how this works.

If you would like to submit logs to the webpage or edit the player wiki, you need to get an account for the website setup. To get this done, contact Nymeria (via page, +mail or email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and give your desired account name (this should not be your character name), password and the email you want to be registered with. Once your account has been setup you will get the address to the login page as well.

Once logged in you will be able to submit logs via the submission form linked off the logs page. A submitted log will not appear until it has been checked over by Nymeria or Balerion, so it may take a day or two to show up. Its important that the instructions on the logs page are followed closely, so that only a minimum of additional editing is needed from the Admin.

You will also be able to contribute entries to the player wiki. If you have any questions about what sort of content should go into the wiki, contact Nymeria or Balerion.

We feel that lately we have seen some NPC usage that does not conform to these rules, with NPCs being used more extensively than has been approved and with no updates being submitted.

Players need to keep in mind that because of how the character system works on Blood of Dragons it is crucial that characters submitted into the CDB are kept updated. If the player of a knight regularly uses his squire as an NPC and establishes personality traits and relations for the squire, yet never submits any updates, a new player may apply for that squire without any knowledge of these things and may CG the character in a totally different way, only to be told when he starts playing that he is doing it wrong.

We want to give players more freedom to use NPCs than we had originally envisioned, but this can only be done if players take care of their end of the bargain by not going beyond approved usage and by providing all relevant updates.

We want to keep the CDB from becoming entirely static by making regular updates to the status of the NPC population with things such as betrothals, marriages, births and deaths. Our initial plan was to do a regular review of the CDB where we go through it and make various changes. For houses with PC members, the idea was then to give them a heads-up regarding changes that we’d like to see in the next few months, and to then let them play it out.

However, doing these regular reviews has proven to be something we just don’t have the time for, so we would love some player input. If you have any suggestions for CDB changes along the lines previously mentioned, let us know. In particular, betrothals that should probably have resulted in marriages or pregnancies that should have happened or should have come to term are things we’d love to be alerted about.

We would very much like the help from our players to advertise the game in venues outside of those that we frequent ourselves, whether these are MU*s, livejournals or forums. An official ad can be viewed using ‘+display nymeria/ad’ (this will give you an evaluated version suitable for forums or livejournals) or ‘ex *nymeria/ad’ (this will give you an unevaluated version suitable for other MU*s). Players can feel free to modify this as they deem appropriate for the venue in question, or to write their own ad, as long as it does not give the wrong impression of the game.

The following points should be kept in mind:

1) Make sure that the venue in question allows advertising.

2) Only advertise in venues where you are a member of the community, unless it is a pure advertising MU*/livejournal/forum.

3) Make sure someone else has not already advertised the game in this venue.

4) If reciprocal advertising is required, we have an ElseMU* board setup for this purpose. However, the other venue would have to allow you to make the reciprocal posting, as guests cannot make use of it.

We’d also appreciate it if you page us or drop us a +mail to note where you have placed the ad, so we can keep track of where the game has been advertised.